Banned in the UK

When Russell Brand was in his midtwenties—before his hair headed ludicrously heavenward, before his language became theatrically arch and elaborate, before he discovered the style and persona that would allow him to blossom, before days and nights of effort and application would earn him a reputation as a dedicated Lothario, before he came to America to play Adam Sandler’s best friend in Disney movies and to supply a role as a charming rake not too dissimilar from himself in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, before he had done anything much, in fact, that might justify the sense of entitlement with which Brand has long paraded himself—he was a minor English TV personality and comedian. He had unremarkable hair and clothes, a reputation for craziness and unreliability, a steadfast heroin addiction, and a commission from an obscure British cable channel to make a series of documentaries.

Few people saw RE:Brand’s six episodes when they were broadcast, and the show did little at the time to bridge the chasm between Brand’s colossal ambition and his meager success, but it has since achieved a certain notoriety. RE:Brand took inspiration from both Jackass and The Tom Green Show, but with Brand in control—though I use the term in control as loosely as the term can be used—the result was very different. Vulnerable and egocentric in unstable proportions, Brand would set himself some kind of challenge or mission for each program—generally selected, he explains, by considering the question "What’s a really disgusting and mental thing to do" Some of his chosen answers: "Wank off a man in a toilet when you’re not gay. Have a fight with your dad. Get in a bath with a homeless man. Try and fuck an old lady."

In the broadcast footage, Brand swivels in microseconds between empathy and chronic insensitivity. At times the results seem appallingly shallow, insincere, and manipulative, but for brief moments it’s as bare, honest, and powerful as TV can be. "I’m glad someone made those television programs," he reflects. "It’s just unfortunate it had to be me.… It was psychological selfharm."

Back then he would tell his friend and collaborator Matt Morgan that once they were done with this series, "we’ll go to America; then we’ll make films." This was a ludicrous conceit—nobody was paying them any attention, even locally—and Brand remembers Morgan’s reply, sensible enough under the circumstances, as being "Shut up, you fucking idiot." But for no reason that could have been clear to anyone living outside Russell Brand’s head, he just presumed. And as with other outlandish presumptions that litter and characterize his rise, so it came to pass. Discussing this now, Brand sees fit to quote the words of the late British comedian Bob Monkhouse:

People laughed when I said I’d become a comedian.

They’re not laughing now.

Few other contemporary stars of Disney movies, I believe it is true to say, also perform standup routines in which rectal smuggling of heroin across international borders is referred to as a commonplace experience from their past. (For the record, Brand’s method: "It was already packaged in blue plastic sealed up with a lighter. Put it in a few layers of cellophane, bundle it up until it’s like a nice stoolshaped package, and then put it as far into your bum as you can stand.")

"For four years," he says, "my life was defined by heroin." By the end, his daily habit cost from $100 to $150. Even so, he never injected, perhaps because he could afford not to. Most of the time he was using, he would simply wander out of the offices of British MTV, where he was working as a host, to score.

Eventually, even MTV had had enough. One notorious incident is usually given as the reason for his dismissal, but in fact there was a series of events. Forced to film a sequence in Ibiza against his will, he had smashed a beer bottle and twisted it into his arm. (Cutting himself in front of other people was a semiregular part of his youthful repertoire.) Meanwhile, his employers had finally worked out the exact nature of his addiction by bluffing a confirmation out of Matt Morgan. To apologize for this, Morgan bought Brand a copy of the complete Seinfeld scripts, thoughtfully inscribing inside:

_Dear Russell,

Sorry I told your boss that you’re a heroin addict.

Love,

Matt._

There was also the matter of Brand jumping on the boss’s car. "I was," he concedes, "a right little nightmare."

Still, the day that has become part of the Russell Brand legend was September 12, 2001. Even if he was suitably horrified by world events, Brand was also excited, because he’d been interested in Osama bin Laden for a while, and now everyone was talking about him. He says, "There was a little bit of, if a band breaks that you’ve known about for ages: ’I’ve fucking listened to them for ages ago—now you’re all into them.…’ " Brand had a flak jacket and a fake beard in the house; he put a tea towel on his head and the transformation was complete: He was ready to be the only person in the Western world to go to work the day after 9/11 dressed as Osama bin Laden. As though hellbent on committing as many transgressions as possible, on that day he also honored a promise to take his drug dealer and his drug dealer’s young son to MTV. (The full horror: If someone had broken into one of the MTV bathrooms at the wrong moment that day, he would have found a drug dealer and a man dressed as Osama bin Laden smoking crack with a child waiting for them to finish. In the handicapped toilet.) Brand introduced his guests to the star he was to interview that day—Kylie Minogue—and conducted the interview, such as it was. "Just gabbling on, drugged up," he says. His recollection is that he didn’t really let Minogue talk at all. And while it is a myth that this day led instantaneously to his firing—"I wore a lot of strange stuff in them days"—he was gone very soon afterward.

Other jobs came and went. He entered rehab in 2002, forced by his manager after being caught taking heroin in the toilets at the management Christmas party, and has been clean for about six years. He credits his drive to quit and stay o drugs to the lure of a more ethereal drug: ambition. "Consistent with most drug addicts, the only reason I stopped is because I had to. In the end, I realized I was not going to be successful if I was taking drugs." The way he tells it, bottoming out for him was less an economic, emotional, or existential crisis than the bleak realization that he was being asked to host dating shows on cable TV. "I was so continually annoyed by the lack of recognition," he says. It pulled him up. Nonetheless, he refuses to lie about its allure and the easy solace it appeared to promise him. "I still miss it," he admits.

Before he came to America, Brand wondered whether what he does would work here. "The things I thought might be problematic—that I’m English and peculiar—are actually hugely advantageous. I think what I inherently possess—verbose, loquacious, obsessed with language...occasionally grandiose but selfeffacing, full of selfdoubt, egotistical—these things are in alignment with assumptions that they have of English people." Also, he adds, "for an American audience I imagine the key things will be what I look like and what I sound like—I’ve got an English accent and a stupid haircut."

He begins his American standup performances by establishing himself: "I’m famous in England. And admittedly fame does lose a little of its cachet when you have to tell people that you have it. English people always say to me, ’Oh, I bet you love it in America, not being famous, must be a relief—do you love it’ I fucking hate it.… My personality doesn’t work without fame. Without fame this haircut just looks like mental illness." Then he’s o, with his own unusual mixture of high and low, fantasy and reminiscence. It’s an idiosyncratic mixture, often less about what he says than the way he brings all the unlikely parts—arcane and elaborate forms of expression, smuggled references (to Foucault, for instance, or Baudelaire) rarely made within comedy routines, the grotesque and the sexual and the childish—all together in an unlikely whole. The longest narrative describes his difficult time hosting the VMAs, much of which focuses on Britney Spears. "It’s difficult to meet someone when you’ve already seen her vagina," he begins, and soon he is miming out the dilemma of whether to shake her hand or, putting thumb and forefinger together as if to grasp something tiny, to shake her clitoris. There’s plenty of lewdness, but as in his memoir, he can somehow use language and seemingly learned allusions to weave the crude and the surreal together so that even when he is propositioning audience members to join him in a threesome, it somehow ends up seeming heartwarming. On the first night of filming in New York for a forthcoming Comedy Central special, horrified laughter greets his simulation—on his knees, tongue out—of how he’d perform oral sex on the queen. He quiets them with a variation of something he has said often before, that seems to express both something of Brand’s core philosophy and his ability to disassociate himself from consequence: "Don’t be disgusted by that. It was just language. Nothing actually happened."

For three of the performances I see, his mother is in the audience. Some of this, I say to Brand later, is remarkable stuff for a mother to hear her son say.

He pauses for quite some time before replying.

"My mum nearly died several times, because of how seriously ill she was"—his mother had cancer three times before he was 20—"and bringing me up must have been incredibly difficult. I was a very awkward individual when I was a drug addict and a petty criminal, always getting arrested and getting in trouble. While she always believed in me and thought I was incredibly talented, it crossed her mind that she was going to die when I was growing up, and it crossed her mind that I was going to die. So I think that having come back from that to a position where I can buy her a house and a car and look after her and she can leave her job and I love her and there’s people adoring me—I think it just bleaches out any of the minutiae of ’Oh, my God, he’s talking about coming in people’s faces.’ I don’t think that that matters. Because it’s like, ’He’s not dead.… Oh, my God, he’s not in prison.… Oh, my God, he’s not a heroin addict.… Who fucking cares’ "

Brand sips green tea poolside at the house he has been renting in the Hollywood Hills—a house, he has been told, that was once Berry Gordy’s love nest for Diana Ross and, further back, a home to Bette Davis. He has been taking meetings about movies. Among the projects under discussion are a remake of Arthur, with Brand in the Dudley Moore role, and an adaptation of Neil Strauss’s The Game, with Brand, inevitably, as the howtopersuadewomentohavesexwithyou guru Mystery. He will soon reprise his Forgetting Sarah Marshall role as English rock star Aldous Snow, now relapsed, in Get Him to the Greek. There is also Bad Father, a movie written by Brand and Morgan. Brand relates its plot in a manner that is somehow both gleeful and selfdeprecating: "An English con man poses as a priest to escape his creditors in a small town in America, gets picked up by an evangelical TV channel, and becomes a rock ’n’ roll Jesus. Hang on to your hats!" This will be produced by Adam Sandler, who spotted Brand’s talents a couple of years ago when Brand interviewed Sandler on British MTV ("He said, ’You’re fucking funny—you’re funny, buddy, I like you, you’re funny’" is how Brand recalls the encounter) and offered to help him. Brand now has Sandler’s agent and just appeared opposite Sandler in the Disney movie Bedtime Stories.

More imminently, he is off to Hawaii to appear in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by Lion King auteur Julie Taymor. Most of his scenes—he plays the jester Trinculo—are with Alfred Molina and Djimon Hounsou. "It’s a shame I’ve got no stuff with Helen Mirren," he reflects. "Maybe one scene at the end. But—" his eyes gleam with playful intent—"she’ll be on that island."

You’re not really going to try

"I’d like a cuddle."

I’m sure you’ll get a cuddle.

"I want a cuddle in a bra."

He sighs with rapture, at the concept if not the prospect.

Especially since he gave up drugs, Brand has put much of the energy not diverted by his grand career ambitions into the pursuit of sexual pleasure. A couple of years back, pressured into estimating how many women he has slept with, he came up with the number 2,000, which he confirms as a reasonable estimate, back then. When I first ask about an average month these days, he is appalled not by the information requested but by the very notion. "There’s no average month!" he exclaims, as though the idea undermines the very fundamentals of how he lives. "If there was ever an average month, I’d kill myself!" He eventually clarifies: "Work out how many days and—here’s a simple rule—triple it!" He laughs. My sense is that while this shouldn’t be taken absolutely literally ("Sometimes I think, Come on, have a day off," he says), it also should be considered a fair and empirical indication as to the spirit with which he greets each new dawn.

Why do you think you sleep with so many women

"I don’t know. I love it, mostly. I’ve got a very addictive personality, and it’s very easy for me to get compulsive about anything sensual. I think my perception of myself as a man is tied up in that particular masculine behavior because of the experiences I had growing up—what my dad was like and stuff.… And then biological drive—I have huge appetites for everything. I like to consume and devour and interact and understand and analyze."

Does it make you happy

"Sometimes. But not always."

Why do they want to sleep with you

"Well, I don’t know—I’m sure there are as many reasons as there are women—but I think if there is a consistency, I think that there’s something that’s very truthful in it. I’m completely honest, I completely love them, and I’m completely in alignment with something that’s truthful. If I was going up to women and going, ’Oh, all right darling, you’ve got lovely hair, do you want to come back to my place, I’ve got a Jacuzzi’—all of which is true—I don’t think it would work. But honestly, the thirst is so powerful: ’Oh, my God, you’re so beautiful, how can you not come with me now, it’s going to be brilliant. Why would you not What are you doing What’s on the telly What are you going to do instead’ I’m not a [real] estate agent with a Porsche key ring on my thumb. The thing I’m offering I can deliver."

What’s the thing you’re offering

"Escape from mundanity."

And yet you’ve talked openly about a whole range of manipulative techniques to achieve an end.

"Well…I’m usually unwilling to be dissuaded. If I want something, I kind of think, Well, why would I not have that I just think that given the right combination of information, people will make different decisions. I think there’s a manipulative aspect to most communication. I never lie. It’s very clear that this is a transient thing—this is about now and tonight and how lovely it can be, and how beautiful they are, and how beautiful everything is at that moment…but that we will die."

That’s part of your patter, isn’t it That we all will die.

"Also a fact." He laughs. "Conveniently reappropriated for my patter. It wouldn’t work if people were eternal."

One of the most disturbing moments in that littleseen documentary series RE:Brand—and this is a series in which Brand slips off his Che Guevara underwear to get in filthy bathwater with a vagrant with weeping leg sores, and in which he masturbates a man in a Londonpub toilet, eventually allowing the man to play with his own genitalia to aid his arousal—involves Brand’s father. It is not so much their boxing match itself, in which Brand inflicts some punishment on his father, but an outburst from Brand when he is asking his father to take part: "One day, mate, you’re going to get a phone call: ’Russell’s killed himself....’ I don’t think you’ve ever really given a fuck about me." ("It’s pretty intense, that," Brand comments when I mention this. "I don’t think that should have been on the television.")

Brand’s father left his mother when he was less than a year old. Their relationship has clearly been a strange and uneasy one, and throughout Brand’s youth they struggled to find things over which they could bond, though they did find one when his father’s plans to take a girlfriend to the Far East fell through, so he took 16yearold Russell instead. The first night in Bangkok, in their shared hotel room, he paid for two girls for himself and one for his son.

"Yeah, it was quite extraordinary, really," says Brand. (He had had one perfunctory semiclothed sexual experience before that trip.) "I didn’t realize, of course, at the time. My dad did that with the best intentions in the world, and I had a lovely time when it was going on. It’s only in retrospect that I’ve thought: I wonder what the impact of that was. But I didn’t at the time—I was overjoyed." They spent many nights on that trip in a similar fashion: "It kind of pretty much followed that pattern." (Those who are measuring how far short they judge Mr. Brand’s fathering may also want to consider the fact that, though he did tell his son to use a condom after that first night, his son used none throughout their Asian travels.)

Do you think he thought he was bestowing a gift, or did it just fit in with what he wanted to do on holiday anyway

"Yeah. Well, that’s difficult, I think. He himself was fatherless, and I think he didn’t really have a template. I think he was relieved that I was no longer a child—I think it was about that.... It’s difficult because I don’t talk to my dad anymore.... I feel it’s a little unfair for me to pillory him. There’s a lot of him in me, and I recognize that. He did instill in me, ferociously, that if you want something, you can have it. In life, just don’t take no for an answer. He regarded life as a malevolent force that wants to destroy you."

Russell Brand studies a cover proof of his memoir, My Booky Wook. This is the American edition, published next month. He likes how it looks, but it’s not quite right. "Do you think it’s possible to border the name" he asks his editor, Gillian Blake. (He means his name, naturally.) "Maybe border it with silver." She says she’ll get on it, and mentions she is pleased to have been able to sit down with him today. "It’s only geography that’s kept us apart, Gillian, and not ideology," Brand tells her. He peels a banana, and they talk about the wider problems of the book world; she notes there is a move within the industry to try to promote the idea of books in general as well as individual titles. Then they discuss the My Booky Wook promotional plans.

"I’ll go on daytime TV shows," Brand offers.

Blake looks doubtful. "I don’t think they’ll have you," she says.

"I’ll fucking kick the doors down!" he blusters, and then he picks up on her earlier idea: "Get any books! It doesn’t have to be mine. Just get a book. Go to a library! Don’t even buy it! Nick it! Do what you want! Just read things you see written down on billboards! Go over to a shelf, pick up a book, and read that! It doesn’t matter what it is! The Satanic Verses! Mein Kampf! Anything. It doesn’t matter.…" He is exploding with enthusiasm at this plan; as often happens, reality has long been left behind in pursuit of an enjoyable train of thought. "I’ll go on daytime TV and promote Mein Kampf: ’It’s one man’s struggle! He’s in a castle! He’s having a good think about things! He’s bitter, very bitter.…’"

That Brand is publishing a memoir in America, a country upon whose consciousness he has yet to be more than a blip, may be less presumptuous than it at first seems. When My Booky Wook appeared in Britain toward the end of 2007, he was already quite famous, but it was the book itself, which quickly became a number one best seller, that expanded, and enriched, his celebrity. From its absurd title onward, it is like few others. "I wanted to communicate that I’d endured difficulties," says Brand, "and also that those things were funny; it had been a hugely sad, comical life." Opening as Brand enters a sexaddiction clinic ("winky nick," as he puts it, winky being childish British slang for "penis," nick slightly more grownup slang for "prison"), it tells the tale of a life so exhaustingly packed with awkward and awful experiences that the reader almost comes to feel that the only way such a life could ultimately have sense of purpose is by ending up as a book.

It is a booky wook in which the narrator often behaves strangely and horribly. As a child, for instance, he is with an old man in his garden; when the old man has to go indoors and mentions to young Russell that he shouldn’t do anything to his flowers while he’s away, Russell can’t resist stamping on them, destroying them all. During various adult entanglements, he spits in one girlfriend’s face, copies the house keys of another so that in the wake of their inevitable breakup he can go round and rob her, and smashes a prostitute’s phone against a wall when its ringing annoys him during sex. To get away with the unsanctioned twoweek holiday he has just taken from a job at a language school, he tells his bosses he has just been diagnosed with AIDS. Much of the rest of the time he is only wildly egotistical and thoughtlessly selfobsessed. And yet his tale is told in such a way—his selflacerating yet irrepressible spirit and humor partly explain it—that most readers so far seem to have come away sighing with sympathy.

After the book was published in Britain, there were plans for the director, Michael Winterbottom, to make a film version. Brand, in an ultimate act of selfmythologizing, would have played himself. Such plans have now been put on hold. "My career took off," Brand explains. "It’s ’Make this film with Judd Apatow. Make this film with Adam Sandler.’ Why am I going to go, ’Hello, America—I nicked my girlfriend’s keys and spit at prostitutes’ when I could go, ’I’m Adam Sandler’s buddy’ It was no longer the most prudent choice."

The most difficult experiences in My Booky Wook are generally turned into lavish performance pieces: a standup version of life. One exception is his account of the abuse he suffered when he was 7. He simply explains that a man who was giving him private tutoring "stuck his finger up my arse and felt my balls," then fairly swiftly moves on as though there’s little more to be said on the matter.

When I ask him about this, he says that, retrospectively, he knows full well that this might be considered a moment of defining significance, but he explains that at the time it just seemed "like another thing happening." It wasn’t so much that this didn’t feel like a terrible dark imposition but that so did more or less everything else. "My mum’s brilliant and loved me so much," he says. "But I had regressive therapy, and they were, ’Can you remember anything positive about your childhood’ and I went, ’No, nothing.’ I mean, yeah, I liked animals. I liked things on the telly. But it was just like…sad, miserable, unhappy, every day. Sometimes I’d do something mad and be excited because I’d run o, break something, something would get caught on fire. And then I’d be elated for a while, but those things would always lead to terrible consequences. Comparatively, it’s pretty fucking mundane and ordinary, but I was very, very unhappy. I really was unhappy. Drug addiction was a relief."

At one point in the book meeting, Brand and his manager, Nik, are asked whether they are heading back to London soon.

"They don’t like us in London anymore," Nik deadpans.

"We’ve ruined that country," says Brand.

For nearly three years, until last October, Russell Brand hosted a weekly radio program on the BBC, until a series of phone messages left on an aging actor’s voice mail sparked a sustained uproar and witch hunt in Britain that is hard to imagine happening here. (Even the prime minister took a moment to denounce what had been done.) Amid the widespread fallout, Brand resigned, and though he offers apologies for the initial offence—a joke that incrementally ran way out of control after he started leaving a message on the 78yearold comic actor Andrew Sachs’s voice mail and his cohost blurted out (accurately) to the absent Sachs that Brand had "fucked your granddaughter"—he takes no responsibility for the subsequent furor "because I didn’t do that." He also believes that most of his audience doesn’t care. "I think what’s actually happened," he says, "is print media is becoming obsolete and—" (To read Brand’s thoughts on the death of print media, and his exclusive account of the BBC controversy, click here.)

One afternoon, I arrive at the Hollywood house not long after he has returned home from being photographed. It is quite common these days for celebrities to leave photo shoots with something that has taken their fancy. A shirt or two, perhaps. Some hair products. In this spirit, Brand has brought back a souvenir that fits his particular tastes. Her name is Penny. When I arrive, she is sitting on his lap and they are looking through a book of photographs by Joel Sternfeld.

Once she has left, Brand notes that there are relatively few kissandtell stories about him in the British newspapers ("on a pro rata basis," he qualifies), something I think he takes as testament to the goodwilled nature of these encounters. But he does see fit to mention a recent such story, which was accompanied by a video interview with the woman in question on the newspaper’s Web site. Brand, naturally, watched it. As he remembers it, she said, "I don’t know what it is about Russell. It’s just like, he says something, you end up doing it. The only thing I can think is, it’s a bit like…"

What a moment. A bit like whom What would she say Brand gives me an idea of the dialogue inside his head in that fraction of a second between words, of the direction he was willing her toward: "Please! Let it be…Jesus! Is it…Gandhi"

Alas, no.

"…Austin Powers."

It wasn’t as though everything else she said was spoton. For instance, she also claimed that he told her: "I’m Russell Brand—I can do anything I like." This he categorically refutes. It is, he insists, simply a lie. He—Russell Brand—would never, ever say that.

"That may be the informing attitude," he says, "but that’s never explicitly stated.…"

On a second evening at the house in Hollywood—almost as if to prove that he is Russell Brand and he will always have more to give—Brand appears from upstairs wearing nothing but a skimpy pair of briefs, sucking a lollipop, and greets me with a body hug and a smack of a kiss on the cheek. It is the early afternoon. He reclines on the sofa; Morrissey looks down from a photo above the mantelpiece.

I invite him to set the scene.

"All right," he says. "Russell Brand reclined on a frankly little bit too itchy sofa wearing what Matt Morgan would describe as little white toddler pants while sucking a See’s lollipop, his latest diversion from angst and neurosis. Remarkably unselfconscious and clearly postcoital, he turned to me and said…"

We talk about the future. His ambitions are sizable. "I don’t just want to be ’an actor in films.’ I want to be able to do standup, write books, do radio shows, appear in movies that I’ve written and directed myself, blah blah blah blah…" In films, he won’t always be the British guy with extraordinary hair and swashbuckling accoutrements. "I’ve got range," he says, both mocking what he is saying and absolutely meaning it. "I’m good at transformation, and I’m good at voices and accents. But first…there’s no point in subverting something that doesn’t exist. No one knows who I am yet."

Penny, his photoshoot memento from the other day, appears from upstairs.

"Penny! You’ve wandered over—motivated only by lust, we can assume. So, Penny, I’ve got to concentrate now. Don’t distract me by being sexually attractive…already you’ve ignored that instruction by looming over me sucking a lollipop. If this was the opening scene in a pornographic film, people would say it was rather overt and crass."

"And who’s in their underwear" Penny asks, not unreasonably.

"Me, but in a nice way. It’s cute when I do it.…"

She kisses him from above, then leaves.

He stares forlornly at his lollipop, which has just deposited some of its mess. "Damn. I was like Icarus. I flew too close to the sun. I really thought I could get away with getting that bit of drool…lollipop juice.… It went wrong.… I’ve learned a lesson.…"

He is evangelical about these lollipops and has instructed his assistant, Tom, to make sure he is never without them. He says that Tom knows to treat such a whim with the utmost seriousness. "Tom recognizes that sometimes I’m unable to prioritize, that I’ll see it as equally important that we have these lollipops as go to meet Paramount Studios: ’I don’t care about that.… The lollipops!’ "

This afternoon he tells me that he knows his life will eventually need to change. "And that if I’m to find any true happiness, that I have to devote myself to something bigger than my own ego. And that is going to have to be huge." But he can see it happening. "I’m really getting tired of materialism. I don’t reckon I’ve got more than two or three years. I’ve burned out drugs. I’m burning out sex." He says that if he could have caused all that BBC fuss "by mistake" in his current incarnation, imagine what he will be able to do when he has removed most of his worldly distractions: "I don’t even know what I’m doing yet. I’m not ready. I’ve got to be in a position where they can’t go, ’Didn’t he fuck that stripper Didn’t he go to that lapdancing club’ There can’t be any of that around. That’s all got to go. Until I’m in a position where I can say, ’Look, I’m celibate. I’m a vegan. All I do is meditate and come out and do standup comedy and make films.’ " Brand takes on the voice of his future thwarted detractors: "’We’ve looked into him, we’ve gone through his litter and his rubbish, and it seems he’s just a man living quietly, eating sprouts and doing yoga. I mean, his farts must be awful, but he’s very nice to be around.…’ When I’m there, then what are they going to do"

Often in his comedy routines Brand will launch into a hyperfast rant about how there should be a spiritual revolution of which he clearly assumes he will be at the vanguard, if not its leader. Brand can talk highgrade, smart nonsense for hours that dodges around the edges of meaning and significance, then eloquently slips away from any deep responsibility for itself, but he is weirdly serious about this. "The thing is, about revolution," he says, "is I do actually mean it." He suggests that now is too soon to talk about it—who, he points out, is going to take "the guy out of Sarah Marshall" seriously—but when I ask him some questions, he lays out some fundamentals:

"Here are some principles that I think that it could be based upon: yoga, vegetarianism, Hinduism. No ownership of property. Collective, communal, and it would have to be collaborative. It would have to be managed in small units for it in any way to be productive. There would have to be certain principles that would be immutable for it to work. That ain’t my role, to design that, because I ain’t got that sort of brain. What I’m good at is attracting attention, and that’s what I will do. And I don’t think for a minute that I should be the person that comes up with how we organize a new postapocalyptic order, because I think I’d exploit it to get girls."

We have dinner early one evening at Dominick’s, on Beverly, an old Rat Pack hangout, where Brand orders a double espresso and a spread of ten vegetarian dishes. ("I love those things," he tells the waitress, raving about the rice balls. "I’d like to inject them.") Brand has been vegetarian since he was 14, partly inspired by Morrissey, who has been an important figure in Brand’s life. Brand, who back in London has a cat called Morrissey, appropriated much of his elaborate use of language from the human version, and they have also gotten to know each other. "I think I’m a reflection of his own narcissism," Brand suggests, "because I love him so much and so obviously and gushingly."

He can talk for hours about what went wrong earlier in his life—and has done so, entertainingly and at great length—but in a way it’s harder to put a finger on why or how things went right. In Britain, his rise was quick but not without further missteps. The two greatest fame spurts were from hosting a TV program, Big Brother’s Big Mouth, in which he discussed with an unruly live audience today’s events from the reality show Big Brother, and from the tabloid interest when he was briefly connected with Kate Moss. Somewhere around that time, he suddenly became the man who looks and sounds as he does now: "What I spoke like and looked like and represented," Brand explains, "all became one thing."

Near the end of our meal, Brand picks up the candle o the table and holds it next to his waist. I ask him what he is doing, but then an eluvial wave hits me before he needs to answer, and I recoil. He says he doesn’t want it to reach the next table, then boasts about the fact that he hasn’t tried to hit on the closest woman, who is of grandmotherly age. In his standup, Brand asserts that his taste in women is anyone from "18 to…death," and this reminds me that I’d heard in his youth he’d once explored the farther reaches of this range. Sixtyone, to be precise. "She was certainly not a young woman," he confirms. "She was in a position of authority in my life. I didn’t cover myself in glory that night. It was a formidable and unusual occurrence, and I weren’t yet ready for such challenges to my narrowminded understanding of bodily aesthetics."

I ask what he learned from the experience.

"Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should."

After dinner, I drop him off at an AA meeting. He tries to attend three times a week. "More, if I feel like I need it." I ask him how he finds it. "I find it necessary. I’m just another bod." He smiles, his hand on the cardoor handle. "All my hardearned individuality, meaningless…"

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